After over a year of my nights and weekends, the Jenny app is done!

Hi all! I just wanna say that I am tired lol. Yes, it's another harness, but I spent a lot of time and effort and have forsaken my hobbies to build the Jenny (like XJ-9) app. Jenny is a free, MIT licensed electron desktop app for running local LLMs with tool calling, rollback, and an IDE.

A lot of you probably had the same thought I did a year or year and a half ago: frontier LLM use is subsidized heavily by private equity and venture capital, which will eventually dry up and then be enshitified. So, I started building a harness that can host local LLMs privately. I went through many vibecoded iterations throughout the past 1.5 years and finally landed on a native electron desktop app. I wanted to make it easy and seamless for people.

I am not a professional software dev but I do have a deep personal interest for it and AI tech. HOWEVER, the Jenny project became a second job and its in a state that I think it's ready for release. This has been a solo project and super fun. I know there are many other options out there that beat me to the punch like Unsloth Desktop (wonderful btw), LM Studio, and Open WebUI, but I hope someone can enjoy Jenny and what it has to offer! I plan to maintain and improve the app, but again, solo here and I do have a day job and friends that I should focus on a bit more. (Opening issues are welcomed, but please be gentle!)

- Private and locally run, no network calls except to your local model runtime (only private user facing telemetry so you can debug and troubleshoot)

- Makes small models capable (highly recommend ornith1.5:9b for tool calling and speed!), but with safety and rollback features so WHEN a small model screws up bad, you don't have to worry. Destructive shell commands need approval and file edits are checkpointed!

- Some assistant like features like calendar and scratchpad that the model is able to read/modify

- llama.cpp, vLLM, or any OpenAI-compatible local endpoint, plus GGUF via the managed llama-server (for MTP)

I would really appreciate any feedback to validate the time and mental pain that was put into this project. I whine, but it's all love! I hope Jenny helps you build too.

Windows build is solid (performance too with 5070ti and ornith15:9b), MacOS is untested cause I'm a poor. No Linux (sorry, but blame engine providers)

I also made an unsigned installer .exe for convenience, but understand if you don't trust it! SmartScreen warning will appear. https://github.com/SaltyPretz3l/jenny/releases/latest/download/Jenny-Setup-x64.exe